and soon it will be morning: appreciating ‘cats’ as theodor adorno might’ve

(This article is around 2,000 words long, so may take you 8 or 10 minutes to read).

I saw Cats the other day with my family. Yeah, I know. But it’s possible that you should, too (you’ll have to hurry; the cinema was virtually empty when we were there in Bristol on the 27th); let me try to explain why you should.

Some cautionary asides at the outset, though, by way of full disclosure.

First, I’m not that into musicals (though I liked Blood Brothers and I’m keen to see Avenue Q – if only because watching funny, goofy Sesame Street-style puppets singing about schadenfreude or that 'the internet is for porn' appeals to my inner adolescent. It's been out for around fifteen years now, I know; sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things).

Second, I once persuaded my good friend J. to see Liquid Sky with me at an arts cinema in Bradford (we lived in Leeds; he had a car). You know, Liquid Sky (1982), the one about extra-terrestrial lesbian heroin-addicted vampires in NYC (okay, this is a rather glib, reductive summary of an impossible-to-summarise film).  

At the time, Liquid Sky was only about a decade old, hadn’t attained the cult status it now holds, hadn’t even yet birthed electroclash in music; you’d think J. would’ve been grateful to me for being, as usual, ten years ahead of the stylistic curve. But no, he commented afterwards: “I can honestly say that that was the worst film I have ever seen.” He’s doing alright now; works for the Financial Times. Make of all this what you will.

Third, there were four of us who went to see Cats. My other half was just disappointed and bored and from time to time asleep; felt embarrassed about her choice (Bohemian Rhapsody last year though; usually she picks winners). My son felt amused and somewhat mystified; he has a generosity of spirit and there’s a lot that he’s prepared to entertain for the sake of family loyalty; possibly he inwardly adjusts his expectations during each of his frequent drives from West London to the West Country.

My daughter and I enjoyed the film however; were grinning and laughing to one another almost the whole way through. In what spirit? Well, we’ve spent lots of Sunday evenings in termtime eating pizza, re-watching Doctor Who and discussing which our favourite episodes are and why (so, yes, the unsocial hours that my wife used to do when working at a residential special school have helped our dad-daughter relationship also hold an occasional aspect of ‘flatmates’); we’ve a shared ‘humour wavelength’ which also stretches to enjoyment of the 1970s disco, nu disco and euphoric trance tunes that I do housework to (the cheesier the better), they get me up and moving you see (I buy this stuff by the yard at Cheddar car boot) and to a connoisseurship of the bad lyric; we’ve a dozen shared favourites in that regard.

On that small sample, then, you’ve a fifty-fifty chance of actually enjoying Cats.

All that said, I can honestly tell you that my appreciation of Cats exceeds my appreciation of ‘ghost/ most/ toast’ in Des’Ree’s ‘Life’ – it’s of another quality altogether – and that I enjoyed Cats about ten times more than The Greatest Showman even though, in every ordinary respect, it’s a worse film.

What’s wrong with Showman? Technically, nothing. Acting, scenery, choreography, plot development, continuity, storytelling: all’s good. The deal-breaker for me, though, was that it back-projects a celebratory pro-diversity politics and poetics (which I wholly support, incidentally) onto P.T. Barnum’s nineteenth-century life. Sorry, I don’t believe it; and for me, leaving a cinema after 100 minutes of P.T. Barnum biopic knowing nothing about P.T.Barnum (how did the American Civil War affect him, for instance? nope, none the wiser) implies having been cheated.

(At least Showman is only empty, a missed opportunity; it’s not actively mendacious about its subject like, for instance, Pochantas – “colours of the wind?”; colours of brutality and colonialism, more like – or the execrable The Boat That Rocked aka ‘The Boat That Was Later To Be Investigated As Part Of Operation Yew Tree’, which deserves to have been tried by a jury of its peers. Don’t think I’m impossible to please. There are lots of popular, populist films which, to a necessarily limited degree, both celebrate and explain properly some particular episode in social history; Made In Dagenham does, for instance. I’ve met Barbara Castle in real life, you know - but I digress).

Cats, of course, doesn’t have the problem of having a real subject matter to misrepresent or just to avoid presenting in the first place; it’s fundamentally just a load of old nonsense about cats (“yes, T.S. Eliot was a great poet; this was one of his weird side projects,” I whispered to my daughter at one point while stealing her popcorn; I’m that parent).

And, while it’s an awful film, it’s better to fail at doing something harmless than to succeed in doing something bad (as I try to tell the wife; she says I’m making excuses; we’re working through it). Better than that, it’s interestingly awful: this is what interested me.

First: there’s the morbid fascination of seeing a veritable galaxy of talent all experience a memorably bad day at the office. I say ‘all’; the post-film consensus of our party was that Taylor Swift at least escapes with her dignity more or less intact, demonstrating a sort of feline ability to land on her feet and walk out of the experience unscathed (oh, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now! Why? Because she's coughing a fur-ball into your shoe). Bill Nighy, too; I could swear he was in it even though his name doesn’t seem to appear on the imdb or other online credits lists (directors sometimes ask for their names to be taken off if a studio has ruined their film, do actors do this too? or was I dreaming/ confabulating back there? you know how it is at Christmas, undigested bits of cheese and so on): I’ve never yet seen him fail in a film and I haven’t now; think of him as an ageing rocker in Love Actually and imagine him in this as someone with a sort of built-in self-ironising force-shield preserving him from harm. Finally (while we’re handing out honourable mentions) there’s Judi Dench, who merely twinkles in a generic all-purpose grandmotherly way for a bit, then looks bored; the good news is that she’ll have to be in at least five more movies before retiring in order to live this down as otherwise, she’ll have a credits list resembling that of Orson Welles (first film credit: Citizen Kane, 1941, last film credit: voice of Unicron in Transformers: The Movie in 1986). As to the rest of the cast, it’d be invidious even to begin to name names.

Second: in ‘anthropomorphised animal’ stories generally, the semiotics of nakedness (proper to beasts) versus being clothed (proper to persons, in most contexts) can be a bit of a puzzler: why does Peter Rabbit wear only a jacket, for instance? This is an inescapable feature of that genre and doesn’t usually cause us more than a momentary aesthetic or conceptual problem; this film, however, magnifies and redoubles this inevitable ‘loose thread’ effect to a vertiginous degree;  some cats go about naked, some clothed, some only seem to wear jewellery (which might be considered a little fast), still others only wear shoes (a box-fresh pair of white trainers in one dance sequence, 1930s chorus line style high heels in another); Judi Dench, as someone’s pointed out, appears to wear a fur coat made out of her own skin – and that is both weird and impossible to unsee.

Similarly, the world-building’s unresolved – is this a version of London based on our familiar human world, except that the humans remain unseen? There’s plenty in the film that would suggest nocturnal cats frolicking behind their owners’ backs, as it were. (Inconsistent scale’s a problem, though. Daughter commented at one point, “cats aren’t that small” – and she was right; domestic cats just aren’t that small relative to knives, forks, dinner plates etc). Or is it a version of London wholly inhabited by cats rather than humans? There’s plenty in the film that would suggest this too, the advertising billboards for instance and the consumer capitalism that they imply appear to address themselves to cats - so there’s a fundamental indeterminacy here, a Schrodinger’s Cat problem so to speak.

Third: semiotics and world-building aside, the cats themselves are compelling but really odd to look at. The way they move, for instance. To what extent are the actors attempting to move in a cat-like way? No-one appears sure of their brief in this respect; many actors move like people for most of their screen time, occasionally throwing in a quick hiss, or some cat-style face washing or milk-lapping as placeholders. (“Like, what the hell? Weirdo?!” – daughter). Other actors – especially if female rather than male, chorus rather than principal – slink around continually in ways which more obviously connote ‘feline’ and which may also gesture towards connoting ‘seductive’ or ‘sexy’; this, in relation to musical theatre generally rather than this movie in particular, is a whole Performance Studies thesis in itself so I’m not going to go into it now.

There’s also a more fundamental problem with looks – an ‘uncanny valley’ problem, to use a term AI and robotics researchers use in order to describe the almost-but-not-quite level of verisimilitude that most of us experience as ‘creepy’. To unpack this a little (and to explore how this is a problem in film, where we necessarily see close-ups of actors’ faces, but not in the theatre where we don’t and can’t): if your pet cat suddenly had eyes, a mouth, hands and feet which exactly resembled a human’s while the rest of its features remained in every other way feline, you’d be both fascinated and repelled. You wouldn’t any longer be able to relate to it straightforwardly as ‘a pet’, but nor would you be able to relate to it as you do the persons with whom you share your life. So that’s perhaps the itchy fascination, the unconscious creepiness behind the conscious amusement, of how we’re meant to relate to the cats that people this movie (or the people who cat it).

Okay, it’s late now; I’m almost done. Someone mutters and the street lamp gutters and soon it will be morning. Here’s one final reflection: the distance between careworn youth (Liquid Sky with J. during the Long Vac) and carefree middle-age (Cats en famille at Christmas) is also the distance between jouissance, il n’y a pas d’hors-texte and all that ironic dinner-party jazz (early 1990s) and a resurgence of interest in the Frankfurt School and other modes of analysis arising out of the Marxist-humanist tradition (late 2010s). I’m not quite sure whether I’m talking about my own story arc or about fashions in literary and cultural criticism more generally at this point. Both, I think. A bit.

Because despite what this article may suggest, I’m actually getting a bit old for ‘so bad it’s good’; that kind of thing's best left to the young and/or insecure. ‘So bad it’s good’? No (despite the fact I’ve spent an evening and two thousand words talking about Cats); if we understand and can also accept our own finiteness and smallness, it’s better for us to pay attention to William Wordsworth rather than William McGonagall, Velvet Goldmine rather than Showgirls (neither of these films is what you’d call family entertainment, of course), Invasion of the Body Snatchers rather than Plan 9 From Outer Space. On the other hand, if we entertain a sort of Frankfurt School critique, seeing almost all mainstream Hollywood films as ‘wrong’ and in their way deceptive, then a film like Cats may be a kind of relevation. When we so often live and move within the pervasively, invisibly wrong, it can be revelatory to encounter the visibly, obviously wrong. If we can then pull and pull at this loose thread in order to undeceive friends, family, neighbours, fellow trade unionists etc by widening their conception of ‘the wrong’ and ‘the bad’ then so much the better: this would be cultural criticism as part of a wider emancipatory project as Adorno and friends always intended.

Last question, though: they filmed Oliver decades ago; when are they going to do Twang!!? The world is waiting.